(February 17, 2016 at 9:04 am)Mathilda Wrote:(February 16, 2016 at 11:59 pm)Emjay Wrote: Metaphors are beautiful... the ultimate way of explaining things by leveraging what you already know/represent. A is to B as X is to Y saves a lot of explanation and I think in neural terms makes for a very efficient form of learning in that A only needs to be associated with X (and B with Y) and the rest - the relationships - already exist. Kind of similar to leveraging the power of musical memory in poetry by making it rhyme... latching memories onto others.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Shaka, when the walls fell. Temba, his arms wide.
I like the point of learning on a neural level. I see knowledge as a context of information created by neural information. The brain does try to understand new things in terms of what it has already experienced.
Yep, so do I
... contexts being the result of bidirectional connectivity and inhibition in the cortex. Attractor dynamics and bias. Beautiful things, contexts, allowing for bootstrapping and pattern completion, but they can be a force to be reckoned with. I was talking about this in another thread... say you've got a hidden object game where the objects you have to find are deliberately placed out of context, it becomes very hard to overcome your bias and assumptions to find them... but that's the point of the game 
But playing such a game really shows it in action and is very enlightening.
